THOUGH WOMEN have been playing golf at Augusta National Golf Club for years as guests, the club refused to admit women as paying members — until now. The chains have been loosened, and two women — Condoleeza Rice and banker Darla Moore — have been admitted as members.

Half the human race is now liberated to pay what are no doubt extremely expensive golf club dues. This reminds me of my grandmother’s stunned reaction when feminists started to plead for more paying jobs. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why do they want jobs?”

NEW YORK (AP) — For the first time in its 80-year history, Augusta National Golf Club has female members.

The home of the Masters, under increasing criticism the last decade because of its all-male membership, invited former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and South Carolina financier Darla Moore to become the first women in green jackets when the club opens for a new season in October.

Both women accepted.

“This is a joyous occasion,” Augusta National chairman Billy Payne said Monday.

The move likely ends a debate that intensified in 2002 when Martha Burk of the National Council of Women’s Organizations urged the club to include women among its members. Former club chairman Hootie Johnson stood his ground, even at the cost of losing Masters television sponsors for two years, when he famously said Augusta National might one day have a woman in a green jacket, “but not at the point of a bayonet.” [cont.]

Diana, who sent the story, writes:

No matter who the first female members would be, it would be wrong. But the fact that Condi Rice is one of them is just too perfect for words, because no woman better exemplifies affirmative action than this non-entity.

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Jesse Powell writes:

There was a giddy piece of feminist triumphalism on this story on the PBS Newshour. Christine Brennan, a sports columnist at USA Today, was being interviewed by Ray Suarez. Brennan said, referring to the decision by Augusta National to admit women as members:

“I think it’s a very big deal. It’s not just about playing golf and sports. To me it’s a cultural story and it’s fitting in many ways that it comes right after the London Olympics, the women’s Olympics. We were talking all about the U.S. women winning so many more gold medals than the U.S. men. And then a week later you’ve got this last bastion of male supremacy, Augusta National Golf Club, finally, in a very public way, and this is a private club that doesn’t tell us anything, making this announcement, unprecedented that they would go so public and be so forthcoming, to talk about not one but two female members. I think it’s a great step for Augusta National and it speaks volumes about the need to have more women not only in the game of golf, which is not exactly the biggest issue in the nation, but also in the corridors of power which is really what we’re talking about when we’re talking about Augusta National.”

The level of open power mongering and triumphalism expressed by Christine Brennan in the interview was quite amazing to behold. Her facial expressions were very happy and the tone of her voice excitable. What was the good news? The public and humiliating cave-in of “this last bastion of male supremacy” to feminist lobbying and hectoring. To Brennan the real issue at stake, as she freely admits, is not the importance of women being allowed to play golf but much more importantly that they be admitted to “the corridors of power” now that the “last bastion of male supremacy” has fallen.

She is positively happy about U.S. female athletes in London winning more gold medals than the male US athletes. By definition this triumph of the American female sex necessitates a poor showing by America’s male athletes. Brennan is not celebrating American women winning gold medals against the women of other nations, she is instead celebrating that women did better than men in their competitions against foreign competitors. In other words she is celebrating female triumph that is by definition based on male failure. She is championing female supremacy plain and simple.

Though Christine Brennan certainly presents herself as a feminist activist, as far as I know she is simply a sports reporter. This open and aggressive “girl power” type cheerleading seems new to me. Apparently wherever men gather with no women around that is “male supremacy,” an intolerable affront. Women-only groups are not taken to signify “female supremacy” and no such women only clubs would ever be viewed as “the corridors of power”; however, whenever men gather together as men it is assumed automatically that all such gatherings must by definition be where the real decisions are made, where the real power must lie. It is this jealously of power that then compels the feminist to “bust in” and “insert herself” into the male gathering so that she can seize some of this male power for herself. Unfortunately the female intruder and usurper then transforms the power structure itself. The old boys network she covets is no longer there.

Laura writes:

When a person talks about the need for more women in the corridors of power, she is necessarily talking about the need to have fewer men in the corridors of power.

Feminism does not mean, and never has meant, simply empowerment of women. It means disempowerment of men. Christine Brennan’s message is, “I am thrilled many men lost at the Olympics. And I am thrilled fewer men will be successful corporate executives.”